The Demo that Wasn’t

The Demo that Wasn’t


I was going to write an article on a new amazing piece of software from a promising sounding start.

The powerpoint was great.

So were the customer testimonials.

The demo that I was going to base the article was canceled at the last moment because an update failed.

They couldn’t revert to an earlier version or such.

They couldn’t show it to me. It’s Friday. Told me it would be next week before I would be able to see the demo.

I am guessing their (previously?) happy customers couldn’t continue with their work.

So, instead of writing an article, I will ask some questions:

  1. How well do you test your software before it goes life?
  2. If it doesn’t work, can you revert or otherwise recover?
  3. If you can’t, how unhappy will your customers be? How many will you lose?

I will not ask whether or not you have a backup for articles that might suddenly not be able to be written.

Please don’t ask me either.

Lance Cottrell

Exited Founder, Board Member, Advisor, Mentor, Angel Investor. I Transform fledgling Founders into Startup Titans.

1 年

Live demos of development code are incredibly high-risk! I always tried to have a dedicated demo environment that was as carefully tested as the production one, and plans for rollback. It's like having backups of your data. Once you have experienced a loss, you get serious about redundancy.

回复

Is it software that allows for seamless, glitch-free updates?

回复
Daniela Semeco

Keyboard Inventor | Legal Tech Entrepreneur

1 年

Our demos only take five minutes, and we’re always at the ready. We keep copies of later versions, document everything and test thoroughly before any launch.

Larry Swan

Board Member/Privately Owned companies / Fractional Leadership / Extensive Manufacturing, C-Suite experience/Proven vision-strategy-execution / Executive coaching/Culture development/Tech savvy/People savvy

1 年

Many years ago, I had spent considerable effort preparing a proposal to be presented to the client in the morning. At about 11 pm my computer crashed. To my horror, I found that I did not have a viable backup of the proposal. A terrible sinking feeling occurs as the realization rolls over you. As I worked through the night rewriting everything, I vowed never again, I will always have a way to recover.

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